by Jo Baker
How was he supposed to have known who she was?
As he drove, he drummed his fingers on the wheel and scowled at the road as it flung itself towards him, the big spreading bare trees against the stars, the telephone poles and lamp posts and the signposts. At the junction, he heaved the car round to turn right onto the A road without even checking for oncoming traffic. Perhaps he would have seen headlights approaching, had there been any. But still, this was careless and he did not have the appearance of a careless man.
How was he supposed to have known who she was?
It was only this evening that he’d seen the poster, pinned to the office board. A picture of the young woman, in walking gear, high up on some hillside, straggling hair and a gap-toothed grin, fresh and outdoorsy and un-made-up. Someone’s friend, that’s what she looked like. Someone’s friend from off the netball team. The girl who helped at Brownies.
And the details underneath. Rachel Powell. Seventeen. Last seen on the seventh of October northbound on the A81 bus. Any information. Etc.
He didn’t know if he should study it carefully, or just glance and look away. He didn’t know what would seem more normal.
It was her, but that wasn’t what she had said her name was.
The poster had been pinned there by Charlotte, the paralegal, with her hair up in a fluffy ponytail, who had started on about the poor girl, friend of her sister’s; family a wreck with worry.
“I hope they find her soon,” he mumbled.
He had poured his last cup of coffee of the day and had gone back to his office and shuffled up his court briefs and he had tried to concentrate. But his head had spun, the words blurring as the memories of that night had come back to him.
He dialled a number. Then he hung up before he’d even finished dialling. Because phone records could be checked. But he wanted to warn, to confer, to settle a story. He wanted to complain. He bit his lip, shook his head: idiot. What was he thinking. He was alone with this. They were not the kind of organisation to have a complaints procedure.
He swung the car round and spun onto the gravel and up the drive. The security light flicked awake. He killed the engine, and he sat there for a moment, breathing, his hands on the wheel. He looked up at the top window; it was dark. She was asleep. He had allowed himself those risks when driving home, because part of his mind was hoping that he would crash, and that would be that, problem solved. It would all be over. And that in a few weeks, all that would be left to mark the spot would be a few dried stems and rotting petals.
Perhaps if he had more nerve, if he was a stronger man, he would not have relied on chance. He would have put his foot down and driven headlong into a telegraph pole.
He got out of the car. He went around to the front and peered at the bumper where he had hit the fox. There was a smudge there, a print, like the mark left by a football on a garage door. He crouched down, got out his handkerchief and breathed onto the paint. He polished with the handkerchief and leaned away to look. The mark was gone, or so it seemed at least in the light of the security lamp, on the gravel sweep in front of his home. He straightened up and pocketed his handkerchief. He got his briefcase from the car, and keyed his way into the house.
If only every accident could be cleared up with so little fuss, he thought.
He took off his shoes and climbed the sweep of stairs. He slipped into the bedroom and his wife turned over in bed.
“It’s late,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You must be exhausted,” she said.
“A bit.”
“You work too hard,” she said.
“I know.”
“I never see you,” she complained.
But she didn’t mind the big house, the holidays, the car, the clothes.
He slipped out of his suit and got in between the cool cotton sheets. His wife’s body was warm and soft—she had put on weight after the second child, and had showed no signs of making an effort to shift it. He eased himself close to her, enjoying the warmth of her body. He thought to himself, perhaps this is alright. Perhaps this could be enough. Perhaps if I just settle for this, and don’t go looking again for anything more, then all that trouble would just go away.
He slid a hand around her waist, and then up to her breast. She breathed out. She hardly ever let him nowadays, but he took this as a signal that he could.
He thought, Maybe I can get over past mistakes. Maybe I can be forgiven. Maybe if I go on just pretending to be the man that everybody thinks I am, then I will actually become that man. And then it won’t be me, anymore, who’s done those dreadful things. It will have been someone else. And so there will be no guilt, no case to answer, because it wasn’t even me.
But as they lay there, side by side, afterwards, and his wife snored quietly, the other thoughts pushed back through and tangled into a briar patch.
He would be good.
But it was too late to be good.
He would change.
Too late.
He wished that it had happened differently.
Wishing changed nothing.
It was an accident.
One girl, you could call one an accident; you could make a case. But two. Two is not misfortune. Two is not even carelessness. Two is intentional. Two is too late.
And if it was too late for him, then he might as well enjoy himself.
Jenny stood in the shower. The hot water cascaded round her, running in rivulets down her naked body. She let it run through her bleach-blond hair, darkening it, and soaking and cleansing her. She soaped her fingernails and hands. She hated the smell that lingered round her from the mushroom farm. Who would have thought that mushrooms would be so smelly—but the stink of the compost, and the white, almost corpselike odour of the mushrooms themselves became overpowering. It lingered in her hair, and on her hands, and she always dumped her overalls at the back door when she came home, because they stank so badly.
But work was work, and there wasn’t much of it round here, not for young people just starting out. Most of her friends had left; they were studying in cities all across the country, or had started jobs or internships in London or Manchester or Birmingham. Those that remained, had remained because they had jobs waiting for them: straight out of school they went full-time on the farm—which is what they’d been itching for, all along, school having been an inconvenient obstacle to getting their day’s work done. Or they joined their dad in the plumber’s van, or haulage company, or joiner’s workshop. You had to have good grades to leave this place, and to stay you had to have a niche already carved out for you in the family firm, and Jenny, with her mum in and out of hospital, and her dad in and out of touch, throughout her teenage years, had neither.
Hence the mushroom farm. Jackson’s Mushrooms, out on the Carnforth road.
But she wasn’t going to be at Jackson’s forever. No. Jenny wasn’t going to settle for that. She was going to make something of herself, she was going to have nice things, and a comfortable lifestyle, and for however long her mother had left—she was on her third round of chemo at the moment—she was going to have nice things for her mother too.
She got out of the shower, and her skin bristled in the chilly bathroom. The house was empty, and so she hadn’t bothered putting the heat on. She wouldn’t be home for long herself—and when her mother was at home, slowly shuffling from bed to sofa to kettle and back, they had to have the heat on high and the bills were scary, so it was better to do without it for a bit. She wrapped herself in a skimpy towel and ran through to her bedroom, where she pulled on her dressing gown and towelled dry her hair. She got out her hairdryer and her makeup case. She had plenty of time. She wasn’t due at the place until eleven. But she had to look—and smell—her best. Tonight, she was going to start her new job. She was, she thought, with a sm
ile, moonlighting.
Moonlighting paid far better than the mushroom farm.
A little later, she was done. She turned her head side to side and looked at herself in the mirror. Her bleach-blond hair was ironed to a flat papery sheet. Her face was matte and a few shades darker than her throat. She blinked false eyelashes and smiled a lipstick smile. She pulled the straps of her skimpy dress up her shoulders. She could do with a coat—a fur, she thought, luxuriously—but she would have to put the purchase of a fur off for the time being. Because there was the gas bill to pay. And her mother needed a fur if anybody did; she was getting so thin. Perhaps—the thought delighted her into a genuine smile—someone would fall in love with her and buy her a fur coat. Would buy her all sorts of things. Anything she took a fancy to. That would make a very pleasant change from having to scrape the money together to buy things for herself. It sucked, having to buy things for herself. But she was looking forward to treating Mum.
She lifted her perfume bottle—a knockoff she’d got from the market, though the fiver it had cost had seemed a lot to her. She sprayed it in great gusts around her, over her hair, and under her arms, and on her wrists and behind her ears, and then, as a last thought, up her skirt so that she shivered as the chill spray hit her thighs. The fragrance was sickly sweet and cloying, but she snuffed it in and thought herself delicious. She slipped her little feet into her killer heels, and then realised she’d need her trainers too, and tottered round in her heels till she found them, stuffed under her bed. She couldn’t drive in heels, and she had to drive—all in all, it would be a thirty-mile round trip up the valley, up the back lanes past Kirkby, to the big house where she was expected. She’d been past the place before, on nights out, to parties in friends’ houses, but neither she nor anyone she knew had ever been inside. A different level of society, that kind of place. There was a glamour to this, there was an excitement. To be expected. To be anticipated. To be wanted at a place like that.
Best to keep to that kind of client, though. They had the money, and she wouldn’t be bumping into them in Aldi or the Rugby Club. That was partly why the mask of makeup, the ironed-out hair. In the normal run of things she’d be barefaced and ponytailed and therefore barely recognisable: being herself by daylight would be her disguise.
Dangling her trainers from her hand, she stood in front of her mirror. She turned from side to side, examining her appearance. Her hair was perfect. Her makeup was perfect. Her heels were perfect. Her dress—skimpy, clinging, just revealing enough—was bloody gorgeous.
He doesn’t stand a chance, she thought. I’ll knock him dead.
* * *
—
“Here’s a thing,” Karen peered round at Steven. “My daughter, she’s seventeen, she’s like, I hate my thighs, I hate my bum; she’s living off SlimFast; she can never be thin enough. And she’s gorgeous; the way she sees herself is a crying shame. I’m twice her size but I’m more at home in myself than she is. Maybe if you wrote your character like that, she’d be more—realistic.”
Steven said, “Okay.”
“I think there’s a bigger question here,” Nicholas said. His fingers were meshed together on the tabletop. It was like he held himself deliberately still, but couldn’t stop that thumbnail from scraping at the other, pushing at the cuticle.
Steven leaned back in his seat. He folded his arms. “Here we go.”
“Yeah, here we go. What it looks like from what we’ve got here is that your killer is punishing women for their sexuality.” Steven looked pleasantly surprised that his intentions had been understood. “They dare to feel powerful, however briefly, but he proves them wrong. And he punishes them for having dared.”
Steven nodded.
“But here’s the thing. Is it him punishing them, or is it you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Because that’s something you need to consider, don’t you think? How big a leap of imagination this is for you.”
“What exactly are you implying?”
“You need to ask yourself that, mate, not me.”
“This is censorship. Your whole attitude. Jesus.”
“Lookit, write whatever you want. I’m serious, go right ahead. Far be it from me to dictate what you do. But take some fucking responsibility for what you let come crawling out of your subconscious.”
“Nicholas,” I said, “that’s enough.”
“It’s just a story,” Steven said. “What’s your excuse?”
There was a moment’s silence.
“You know what? Fuck this.” Nicholas grabbed his bag and shoved back his chair and was gone. The door slowly closed behind him. Steven asked, eyebrows up in astonishment, “What’s his problem?”
Karen said, “I think we could be a bit nicer to him.”
Steven snorted.
“If you paid any attention at all,” Meryl said, “you’d know what his problem was.”
“Can we just cool it, d’you think?”
“So, what, we all have to tiptoe round him now?” Richard asked.
“I’m not tiptoeing round anyone. He can tiptoe round me,” said Steven. “Maybe I’m offended now.”
Meryl tsked. She went to get up, to follow Nicholas, but I waved her back down.
“You guys take a break, grab a coffee; we’ll start back in fifteen minutes.”
* * *
—
He hadn’t gone far; he was smoking a cigarette under the tree in the quad. I sat down beside him on the bench; he flicked a scowl at me.
“I’ll go if you don’t want me here.”
“Stay.”
Just that one word, but it felt loaded with meaning. I felt like we understood each other.
“You were making good points, you know. Though you kinda blew it by swearing. And then storming out.”
“You know what?” he said. “I don’t care. I’m done. He’s never going to understand. It’s always going to be blah blah blah, dead girl, blah blah blah sexy girl. Blah blah blah terrified sexy girl. Blah blah blah sexy dead girl. And so it goes on, so many dead girls, and it is such bullshit. He has no idea the lies he’s telling.” He raised his shoulders, then lowered them; a slow, heavy shrug. The air was wet with drizzle, a grey misty curtain around us.
“I wanted to say,” I said, “you could talk to someone.”
He was already shaking his head.
“…they have counsellors here and maybe if you were to go and see one of them…”
“No.”
“Just, no?”
“Talking doesn’t help. I know it doesn’t help. It might help some people but it doesn’t help me.”
“You’ve tried counselling before?”
He drew on his cigarette, blew smoke, nodded.
“It didn’t help even a bit?”
“Torture,” he said. “And still.” He swung his hand round, including the situation he was in. “I realised some time ago that all I can do is write it out of my system. That’s the only thing that works.”
“If that’s what you need,” I said, “then I’ll do my best to help.”
He nodded his thanks.
“And I’ll—talk to Steven. See if we can get him to tone it down. See if we can’t work something out.”
He sucked his cigarette into a hot coal, then he flicked the stub away, out into the rain. It hit the grass and sparked and faded out.
“Good,” he said. “Because otherwise I’m just going to have to stay away from class.”
“Try to not let it get to you,” I said, though I knew how inadequate that was. “Look, I’ve got to get back. Are you coming?”
He shook his head. He picked up his pack of cigarettes from the bench, tucked his lighter into it.
“Have you got somewhere you can go? It’s maybe not a good idea to be alone right now.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, and then he said, “I’m not great company anyway.”
He sloped off through the fine rain, and I ran back to class.
* * *
—
“That kid is such a…” Richard glanced round at me as I came in, and looked caught out, but finished his sentence anyway, sheepishly: “…snowflake.” I took my place at the table, rubbed my hand through my wet hair.
Meryl was red and shiny and blinking. “Actually I think that term is super-unhelpful.”
“It wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t necessary,” Steven said.
“He’s traumatised; you’ve read his work.”
A snort. “ ‘Traumatised.’ He’s not traumatised, he’s a nutjob.”
“Okay,” I said. “We do have rules here. We have responsibilities towards each other. This is not a free-for-all.”
“Tell that to the prima donna out there.”
“I don’t accept swearing in the class and I have spoken to him about that. But from now on, if you present violent or explicit work, you post a trigger warning. You’ve all had access to the protocol document. If things don’t change I will have to refer this to our Head of Department, and you could both end up in front of the Disciplinary Committee.”
“But nothing happened,” Steven said.
“What?”
“Nothing happened to her.”
For me, the pronoun kept slipping between Steven’s character and Nicholas’s lost girl, and I couldn’t pin it down. I shook my head. “What?”
“Nothing violent or explicit. Jesus. Trigger warning for cheap perfume now? Or that fox?” he hissed out a breath.
“Let’s not be flippant here,” I said.
“I’m not being flippant; I’m being deadly serious. This is PC gone mad. We’ve got to post a warning that a story may contain conflict and jeopardy now? Of course it bloody might; it should, it has to. Otherwise what is it? Not a story, that’s what. And what about his stuff? That’s properly weird; even if it’s true. In fact it’s weirder if it’s true. What if I decide that his stuff is upsetting me? What if my dog just died and I decide to throw a hissy-fit because he kicked a dog that reminds me of mine? What then?”
